Aside from the downbeat drama of having your possessions stolen, its biggest moment comes when you help a bystander straighten the sign on his shop.
Shenmue was a plodding game, and in those first few hours traipsing around the streets of Wan Chai without a penny to your name its sequel is no different. It later returns, but all the money is gone for good: Shenmue 2's opening impresses nothing more than the adult world pressing down hard upon Ryo's shoulders. Step past the harbour, beyond the fountain and past the brownstone houses, and the bag containing all the possessions you gathered throughout the first game is stolen. It can be a cruel city, too - stepping off the boat from Japan, you're confronted with the hot, hostile breath of the place, a photographer shoving his camera in your face and later forcibly trying to sell you the resulting picture. In Shenmue 2, away from the care of Haruki's housekeeper Ine Hayata, you're left to fend for yourself, your first hours in the city spent looking for nothing more than a pocketful of change and a roof over your head. Every morning there's money waiting for you on the counter, your days spent killing time with the cushion of your own home to return to, the pillow of your own bed to crash back on. The small-town streets of Yokosuka are witnessed through the safe cocoon of adolescence. Its essence is something more pedestrian, more profoundly ordinary. Like Shenmue before it, this isn't a game about revenge, or even one fuelled by bloodlust. Having slowly tracked your father's killer Lan Di through Yokosuka and beyond Japan, as Ryo Hazuki you find yourself on the shores of Hong Kong, taking up the quest in typically ponderous fashion. Shenmue 2 came to the Dreamcast less than a year after the original - in Europe, at least - yet it offers a steep shift in scale and tone. It gets down to a greater truth about not only this city, but all great metropolis: the unknowable sprawl, where the urban space is painted as eternally indifferent. That's all hokum, though, and Shenmue 2's not one to deal in such platitudes. It's a common banality to mark Hong Kong as a city of contrasts where the stiff-lipped colonies clash with traditional Chinese culture, where east meets west and tradition meets modernity. Yet AM2's Hong Kong is thick with character and purpose: an overwhelming city where you sink into a gentle rut amidst its wider rhythms, where human life flows through its streets, ebbing in from the harbour before it splashes down sidewalks and sends slow, chattering oxbows around cluttered alleyways. Shenmue 2's Hong Kong isn't the biggest of open worlds, and unlike the Yokosuka suburb that preceded it, it can hardly claim to be the densest. There's so much of it, it feels impenetrable.
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